My Own Pirate Radio

I’m interested in how people discover things: web pages, music, places to eat, other people to hang out with, so on and so forth. Here are two items in that vein that I recently stumbled upon:

1. Discovering music: I signed up a while back with Last.fm, and played around with it for a bit. It’s interesting, but somehow left me a little flat. Last.fm uses collaborative filtering to recommend music that people with similar tastes enjoy. It’s a Black Box approach: assume you will never satisfactorily model the human brain and instead, just map human behavior and draw inferences from that. Where it fails for me is that there isn’t enough randomness; song sequences are too similar. Subsequently I’ve heard a lot about Pandora, which takes a totally different approach and tries to model the “genetics” of music. So… the new thing is a mashup of the two services. I just signed up.

2. Discovering people: If you are considering or have tried online dating, take a look at TeamDating. They enable group dates. Seems smart to me… there’s safety, fun, and serendipty in numbers.

3. Meta: I found out about the Pandora/Last.fm mashup from TechCrunch, and TeamDating via Springwise. If you are into business innovation and haven’t seen Springwise, check it out. They seek out and write about innovative new businesses almost every day.